


Face to Face

by the_blue_fairie



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: Angst, Catharsis, Gen, Northuldra (Disney), Trauma, complicated feelings, snow sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28290921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_blue_fairie/pseuds/the_blue_fairie
Summary: Sometimes, people can love you and desire what is best for you... and still hurt you. The events of Frozen 2 behind her, Elsa reflects on the trauma she has known.
Relationships: Agnarr/Iduna (Disney), Anna & Elsa (Disney)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Face to Face

_Father, you know what’s best for me…_

_Mother, you were here_ _  
Mother, you are gone…_

She saw reflections of herself in them.

Her father’s fear, a mirror of her own…

Her mother’s tears, silver in her eyes…

Anna only had the chance to see the door, its fine rosemaling the design of a king – conceived, composed with statesman’s craft, the ornamentation of a heart in grief; the pattern that diverts the eye, like in a king’s crown, in courtly attire, in the pageantry that is painted with a portrait, orb and scepter glinting, catching the eye instead of the face of doubt, overpainted with refinement anyway to be the face of the land and not a man – its rosemaling the perfect pattern of a queen, everyone’s queen, everything to everyone, smile flashing like the silver on her brow… while Elsa saw beyond the door…

Elsa saw the lines upon her father’s face the painter would only catch to discard, catch in the eye but not in the brush.

(A brush can stipple over even the mind’s eye in time…)

Elsa saw her mother’s tears sliding down her cheeks, not silver but clear as any tears.

Elsa heard the softness in their voices…

( _Conceal it, don’t feel it_ can _sound_ hard, but…)

The snugness the first time the gloves slipped over her hands…

The gentleness with which her father clasped them…

The darkness that fell with the fall of the curtains…

The echoing silence when the gates were shut…

( _Go away, Anna_ sounded hard too…)

( _A false equivalency_ , Anna would call that, but Anna didn’t know, Elsa knew, Elsa had seen, seen the pain in mama and papa’s faces, pain because of Elsa – no, not _because of_ , pain for the sake of Elsa, Elsa had to defend them…)

(The fault was _mine_ …)

(Never mind that _Go away, Anna_ only came to her mind because of their teaching – _came to mind?_ – _came_ implied a natural emergence, coming willingly, when it was as natural to her as… as cruelty was to mama and papa…)

(That is to say, not natural at all.)

(They loved her.)

(As she loved them, loved Anna…)

(It was not a false equivalency at all, couldn’t she make her sister see that? make _herself_ see that?)

Never mind that they were tall as the shadows of trees that rose before her on that long night, that long journey to the trolls… Never mind that she was tiny, a little girl (a little girl they _held_ in their arms all that long way, was she forgetting that?) – Never mind that she had been a child, a child is not a mold of their parents, death-mask-imprint, mama and papa did not stamp her features, corpse-white, death-mask white, she did not die in childhood, she, she, she lived, it was… fleeing her own culpability to claim the imprint theirs when…

(When they loved her…)

(They were never cruel…)

(They wanted to protect her as she had wanted to protect Anna…)

(They were never cruel just as she was never cruel…)

(If they hurt her, then she hurt…)

_False equivalency false equivalency false equivalency false equivalency_ – the whisper like guilt that was the relinquishing of guilt – the letting go of guilt, but she could not let go…

Letting go…

Youthful impetuousness. An impulsiveness that sent a storm spiraling, damn the consequences…

Cringeworthy.

_Don't let them in, don't let them see_ _  
Be the good girl you always have to be  
Conceal, don't feel, don't let them know  
Well, now they know!_

(The fault was _mine_ …)

She had grown beyond the relinquishing of guilt, the release of it to the icy winds, the blue hues of her first ice gown new-spun into snow-whiteness, new-spun, spinning full circle, grown into the guilt again, into the ease of the wince, the guilt was good now because it was easy, silken as ice-gossamer, not frosting the throat, no, not with ice-needles, good, be the good girl you always have to…

There was anger in her voice on the mountaintop…

(Anger splinters ice-needles that settle in the throat.)

(Anger is youth, maturity is peace.)

(Peace settles as ice-needles, coating the throat, pricking the throat with guilt at guiltlessness, an inversion of guilt that becomes guilt itself, but… subtle in the lungs…)

(Anger sends the needles flying, not self-collapse but self-construction, sculpting spires, not stepping in but stepping forward, for herself, not stepping into patterns already woven but stamping her own upon the earth, singing out, hips swaying in sensuality – _hers_ , her own monument of her own making and anger was the edge – not the edge of needles that carve the throat, hoarfrost from within, inversion, but the edge that carves _her_ ice, shaves the frost from the steps as she storms on, not self-destruction but the exhilaration of creation…)

Cringe-inducing.

Peace settles as a wisp of breath from a throat already half-coated with shards, tears of blood running from within…

Tears.

Tears can

(cleanse/blind)

(cleanse/blind)

(cleanse/blind)

(cleanse)

(blind)

(blind)

Tears cast her mother in silver hues, flashing like a diadem, deflective. Yet, there is a softness in the silver, for even diadem-deflection is as a dream of before, when mama tucked her to her bosom with Anna beside her, both in their mother’s arms… even that has its allure, dream-distant, even when the silver sheen shimmers in the dimness of the locked-door room, her locked-door room, Elsa’s…

Silver blends with snow-whiteness, brilliant beneath ice-sandaled feet, bends the shape of her, the shapes, distortive, so many facets glinting, blurring, until your eyes leak with awe and you call it catharsis, call it relief, call it… peace, needle-pricking, and what to call the needles if they are peace? peace cannot prickle, peace cannot bleed, except that it can, it does, except that the word, deflective, bends itself, becomes _reflective_ , not in self but in word, you speaking your word but not on your terms…

A relief that does not relieve but that insists it does and each insistence whispers less relief into your heart…

Effigies stood in Ahtohallan, effigies ice-carven, of mama and papa, younger than she had been when the gates were shut…

Her mother’s graven hair flowing about her like the foam-crested sea curving and cascading, sapphire-leaves swirling, circling her…

(Free…)

Her father’s face soft even in the stonelike ice, head bowed before his father, his tutor…

(Yearning a freedom like her own…)

Effigies etched to distinctness, the detail in their eyes catching the cavern’s luminescence, that luminescence imbuing their eyes with light and love as they grew…

(Love…)

(They loved her…)

That thought was warm – as blood was warm, welling in her throat in a fountain, bounty to the parched, she drank deep the blood for want of water, swallowed it back down, never mind that it was her blood, welling from the wounds of the thorns in her throat – better to swallow back the thorns, the feeling as she swallowed wasn’t choking, she wasn’t gagging, the congestion was warm as water was cool to a dying woman in the pale and shadowless light…

She had learned to savor the taste of her own blood, pretend it was sweet, and when she sang now, she let the blood flow down her throat like cinnamon cider – the barbs, the cloves, not barbs at all – because the only alternative was a song of anger, a song of wince and cringe that she had told herself she had outgrown…

(Never mind that the song of anger did not culminate in anger. Never mind that the anger’s edge did not bleed through the song as prone peace now bled upon her tongue. Never mind that the anger of its edge, the defiance, led not to implosion but ascension. Never mind that…)

Her mother wrapped her and her sister in her gentle arms singing a song of her people, long-lost – not in diadem-silver or in tear-silver but in crystal-blue as Elsa’s first ice gown, as the jewel of her ice palace in the rose-tinted dawn.

Her mother’s lullaby, a song of defiance – as Elsa’s first song of defiance…

A song of defiance silvered over with peace, confined within silver bars, confined within the silver circlet that rounded the mortal temples of Iduna…

Such was a peace that swallowed down blood, that grew to accept the reconciliation instead of the anger, because mother never had a chance to scream the anger, to sing her song of defiance to the skies – _Na na na heyana / Hahiyaha naha_ – it wasn’t even really a reconciliation that she grew to accept, for _reconciliation_ implies mutuality, but a peace, just as Elsa grew to accept a peace with an aporia…

The ice-Iduna gathering her children to her arms sat beside an ice-Iduna nodding in affirmation as the gates were shut, the silence echoing as the silence from an abyss, an aporia…

Drawing closer and closer to the aporia…

( _They loved me…_ )

The thing she dared not name did not deny that love, but to say it was to carve a gash into the walls of Ahtohallan, split the false wall as she had done when she had followed Runeard’s effigy, except now it was she erecting a wall within her heart’s chambers…

( _They – you –_ )

Standing upon the brink, chasm yawning before her, lungs burning with the cold, bleeding –

( _You hurt me._ )

Anna’s eyes meeting hers the first time she closed the door…

( _Hurt us._ )

( _You hurt us._ )

She half-expected the ice lining her throat to spread, to feel the blood running down her throat congeal into ice itself, along with the blood in her veins, to feel the ice silver-snake her limbs, stiffen her joints, and yet… it had been the peace that settled the ice, the thorn-frost, needle-sharp, making her to bleed – the peace that allowed the blood to clog, the peace that choked her when she dared not call it choking… and it was the defiance that dispelled the silver scarring her throat, sent the silver shards spiraling…

She half-expected to hack up the blood, retch it up, body bent in blackness of the void, body bowed as after the plunge, kneeling as an exhausted dancer, hair fallen about her face…

Anger was violence, was it not? and peace was peace, maturity’s peace? Some violence, then, as consequence for this… violence… in her heart…

( _You hurt us._ )

But there was no violence – no cataclysm come upon her, no cracking of the foundations of Ahtohallan, no crashing of its walls…

Instead, when she swallowed, she no longer tasted blood.

No longer felt the frost.

She had pretended the pain’s absence for so long, called it cinnamon cider, that she almost feared this was that – but those devil’s mirror shards, she had flung from her as she had flung her gloves to the sky atop the North Mountain.

Devil’s mirror shards fallen away, her mother rose before her, a visage amid the crystal-blue, smooth as skin swabbed of the sweat of guilt, smooth as clarity – not a monument of awe, towering over her daughter, not a statue in the square, but a woman, soft and shivering as the dappled hues that danced through Ahtohallan. Arendelle silver hung about her brow as a shackle hangs about a wrist, a shawl of scarlet, Northuldra-patterned, hung about her neck, shivering with her, a last remnant, a last vestige… as if afraid…

Her eyes were dark, misted with guilt, as Elsa’s always had been.

( _False equivalency._ )

(No, not as Elsa’s had been, with their own guilt, their own fear, but a fear with which Elsa empathized…)

A supplication in those eyes – _forgive me_ –

A hand reaching out through the crystal-blue –

Elsa raised her own hand, stretched it out, pressed her palm to the wall of ice…

Her fingers met her mother’s.

The two women stood before one another, face to face – and Elsa saw in Iduna’s eyes the shadows of a village burned… It seemed a host of Arendellian soldiers was at her mother’s back, swords drawn to cut her mother down, coming in a long line, silver as a pall… or were the faces Arendellian? or older, other, other faces, other lands with a hatred of magic, who would not suffer a witch to live? coming endlessly from the dim imprint of history that marked her mother and that in turn marked her, marked Anna…

A silver chain, fear forging each new ring with each passing generation, Iduna forging as she had been taught, teaching her daughters in her turn…

But not as her mothers taught her, for there is kinship in the passing of pain that is known to children that will also know that pain, it is not the passing of pain but the whispered knowledge of survival… but Iduna’s throat had been shackled in silver, Agnarr’s spilling silver as though he had ingested liquid mercury (a son of pain, but not like hers, Arendelle-silver dangled in the baubles that hung above his crib – _no, not pain_ – Arendelle-gold had been wrought for his brow from birth, he could surmise, perhaps, but he did not know…)

(He did not know as they knew…)

(The falsest of false equivalencies was to say he knew as they knew…)

A shadow she thought was Grandfather coming up behind her mother, but it was not Grandfather, it was her Father, looking so like his father in the dim, eyes pleading for her forgiveness…

Elsa’s fingers entwined with her mother’s, looking her in the eyes, looking her father in the eyes, on equal footing with them for once in her life, feeling Anna’s presence somehow for Anna’s will was stronger than the foundations of Ahtohallan, and Anna’s eyes were fixed on them – _hello father, hello mother_ –

* * *

Upon her return to the village, Elsa ran her fingers over every carven thing.

She ran her hand over every quilt, tracing every pattern, every diamond, every line…

She ran her hand over every hanging fabric, every reindeer hide…

Each goahti she passed had not been burned…

The village stood.

Stood.

Upon Elsa’s return to the village, the children ran to her.

She embraced them, kissed them, traced their faces and the furs of their caps.

Yelana was waiting there, the wisdom of many mothers Elsa had never known in the creases of her face, a warmer mother than Elsa had ever known, unshackled by Arendelle silver…

Elsa clasped Yelana’s hands to hers – living hands, warm hands, hands of memories still to be made…

The day was crisp and clear.

Clear.

Elsa took to the nokk, spurred it across the waters, and when she came to the fjord, Anna was waiting there, as though she had felt the reverberations in Ahtohallan, Anna knew, Anna had always known, her will was stronger than the circlet of Arendelle silver upon her brow, Arendelle’s queen, her sister, victim as Elsa was a victim, the hurt ran deep, the trauma of their childhoods, the trauma of before, her sister, Anna, Anna…

Elsa threw her arms around her, held her tightly, could not let her go, tears flowing freely down her face…

Tears can cleanse.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a complicated relationship with Agnarr and Iduna. They are fascinating characters. I love them dearly and I know that they dearly loved their daughters, but at the same time, I sometimes feel the franchise uses that love to ignore the way Agnarr and Iduna hurt their daughters. Dangerous Secrets delves into it more deeply than the main text of the films/shorts, but even then, it does so from their perspectives. We seldom get to see Elsa and Anna processing how their parents' actions hurt them, seldom get to see Elsa and Anna coming to terms with that pain. So I needed to write this, to give the sisters catharsis and also to explore the depths of intergenerational trauma and their connection to the Northuldra.
> 
> Everything I write is deeply personal, and my friends are probably weary of me saying that my own work means a lot to me, but I truly did pour my soul into this piece. And, if you read it, I hope it moves with you. Please review. I want to hear your thoughts, hear if this resonated with you on the personal level it did with me while writing it. Thank you.


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